Society for the Protection of Unborn Children
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London, SE11 4AB, United Kingdom
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Email: information@spuc.org.uk

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SPUC asks parliamentary committee to reject pro-abortion evidence

London, 17 July 2002--The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) has called on the House of Commons' select committee on health to reject evidence from pro-abortion groups given to last week's hearing on sexual health.

In a letter to Mr David Hinchcliffe MP, chairman of the committee, SPUC describes areas of concern as follows:

• calls for: abortion to be performed by non-doctors and the specific targeting of nurses to become abortionists; the liberalisation of the law to allow abortion explicitly on demand in the first trimester of pregnancy; and the provision of chemical abortion in family planning clinics. Taken together, and in the context of other comments by the witnesses, the agenda is clearly total deregulation of abortion, and indeed could be regarded as "backstreet abortion" by another name.
• comments by Liz Davies (Marie Stopes International). She told the committee, "fewer and fewer doctors are willing to perform abortion" for, among other reasons, "moral objections". The increasing number of particularly junior doctors refusing to perform abortions indicates that the medical profession is beginning to understand the barbaric nature of the deliberate destruction of unborn children. Given the government's purported wish to see a drop in the number of abortions, this mood in the profession should be taken as an opportunity for the promotion of the more positive and desired alternatives to abortion, not an excuse to weaken the existing (if feeble) restrictions.
• proposals to "ratchet-up" service provision targets and misleading references to "reproductive and sexual health" provision. The fact that abortion causes, rather than solves, health problems, such as breast cancer, has been ignored.
• the call for parents to initiate discussions with their children about sexual matters from the age of four or five and for sex education to begin in primary school. We are also disturbed by Ann Weyman's (fpa) statement that she "found the concept of 'children's innocence' to be a strange one, because why should sex be associated with guilt?" This call for the sexualisation of children is an attempt by the increasingly money-hungry abortion industry to increase the future market for abortion and abortifacients like the morning-after pill (albeit marketed as "contraceptives"). The fact that Ms Weyman cannot appreciate children's innocence demonstrates how extreme the pro-abortion lobby has become.